221–230 of 361 posts
I know someone who worked on smart TV software. They explicitly added audio fingerprinting via integrated microphone so they could determine which programs you were watching for ad profiling. When in the history of online ads have advertisers not used available data?
I don't get this, why would they use a microphone when they already have the original quality audio stream going to the speakers?
> ...they would need to be feeding those snippets in almost real time into a system which forwards them onto advertising partners who then feed that information into targeting networks... I think this is totally mistaken. An ad seller which also wants to respect privacy keeps this data in-house and does the ad targeting themselves. The advertiser never needs to see personal information for this kind of market to give…
We're specifically talking about Apple here, based on Siri wake words. Do you think Apple are running this kind ad of targeting?
Every time I read some technical description about why this isn't happening, the technical description seems convincing. However... A friend tested the theory a few years ago. He doesn't own a swimming pool, doesn't want to, and has never expressed any desire to. He put his and his wife's phone on the table and said to the wife (loudly), "Why don't we look into pool fencing?". She agreed with him. Shortly after, on b…
I’m fascinated that this urban legend persists among tech people because it’s so easy to disprove. Did you know that you can set up a proxy from your phone and capture all traffic from it? It would be so trivial to find the traffic from your phone. There are ways to MITM and inspect the traffic, too. There are also many people doing static reverse engineering of phone apps looking for security vulnerabilities. To bel…
As for whistleblowing... Is there really that much to whistleblow about it? We already know that ad-based companies like Google are collecting our data every chance they get, because they make billions of dollars from it. They're scraping our emails, studying our GPS location, paying attention to who we are in proximity with, etc. The level of surveillance is incredible and people don't really care. It wouldn't be headline news to find out that they are taking advantage of yet another side channel.
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If you read my article I quote that exact paragraph, and then call out the Ars Technica reporter for the way they misleadingly rephrased this similar paragraph from the Reuters report that Ars Technica cite as their source: > One Siri user said his private discussions with his doctor about a “brand name surgical treatment” caused him to receive targeted ads for that treatment, while two others said their discussions…
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>We live in public housing, no luxuries. >Gucci Gucci is classified as an "aspirational luxury" brand. In other words, luxury for poor people. It makes total sense that it would be pushed to people in public housing. If you get recommendations for European brands you've never heard of selling $5000 t-shirts, then I'd be worried.
I'm not worried, and thanks for suggesting that advertising would be a viable motive given our geolocation. Good thing Apple doesn't also have means and opportunity, too. Silly me! I guess we should all just blindly trust Apple. Thanks, friend.
>I guess we should all just blindly trust Apple. Thanks, friend.
Never claimed any of those things. Quit putting words in my mouth.
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>Technilogical causes are much more likely than accidental causes for such effects to appear, in today's world. This is absurd. The chances of rolling snake eyes twice in a row is 0.07%. However, that doesn't mean if I do get snake eyes back to back, I should think it's caused by "Technilogical causes" (aliens? CIA remotely controlling the dice?). At best, it's an incomplete argument. The power of the birthday parado…
> (aliens? CIA remotely controlling the dice?) No, more like Siri, bruh. To sell some too-expensive slippers. You used the word "absurd", didn't ya? > accidentally recording siri queries Sure. Apple does things by accident. Gotcha. Motive, means, opportunity. Which is missing?
The dice analogy is clearly a separate scenario than your guci slippers story, I'm not sure why you're trying to bring siri into that analogy. The point is that you can't just invoke "Technilogical causes are much more likely than accidental causes for such effects to appear, in today's world" without justification. If there's spooky stuff happening at a rate far higher than to be expected by pure chance, and there was proper documentation of this, I might be amenable to the above argument, but you haven't done that. In previous comments I listed multiple reasons issues with relying on random anecdotes, but you failed to rebut them.
>Sure. Apple does things by accident. Gotcha.
Is it really so unbelievable that automatic speech recognition would have false positives? There's plenty of things to criticize about Apple's behavior in that case (eg. not taking steps to ensure audio from accidental triggers are deleted), but the implication that they're intentionally doing it is totally unsupported.
>Motive, means, opportunity. Which is missing?
Proof that a crime has actually been committed. With that logic we should be arresting people for murder every time their ex/spouse goes missing, even if there's no evidence that foul play occurred. If it's been actually proven (ie. more rigorous evidence than random anecdotes) that people are getting targeted advertisements based on their conversations, maybe we can start assigning blame, but we haven't even established that's happening yet.
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Add at least two zeros to your number. Pixel phones can detect the top 11k songs while being offline (it used to be more). The fingerprint database for this is around 500 MB in size. I think it is very easy to sneak a few (thousand) extra fingerprints in this database and do all kinds of tracking with it. All while the green microphone icon is disabled.
For argument’s sake, let’s be generous and stipulate your phone is listening for 11k keywords to serve you ads. Why would “pool fencing” take up one of those valuable keyword slots on everyone’s phone? And you’re going to see way less than 11k ads per day. Why would the ad server prioritize serving an ad for pool fencing (a phrase said once) over all the far more common topics a person talks about in a typical day, l…
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I hate corporations as much as the next guy (probably more than the next guy) but the argument that "it wasn't proven they were doing it which proves they were doing it" is probably the worst one you could have come up with tbh.
That case dragged on for 5 years, and ended up with them paying $95 million anyway. I think if they could have proved that they weren't doing it, they would have. Maybe I didn't say that clearly but it makes a lot of sense.
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Good analogy. Just like anyone with a lick of sense can see the spherical Earth from an airplane, so can anyone see the absence of this network traffic from any network analyzer. It’s not there. It does not exist. And nevermind the conspiratorial thinking required to believe whole teams of engineers are developing and maintaining this capability across several giant companies, but nobody ever puts it on a resume. App…
>And nevermind the conspiratorial thinking required to believe whole teams of engineers are developing and maintaining this capability across several giant companies, but nobody ever puts it on a resume. Apparently the thousands of people working on this are all personally committed to complete secrecy, forever. Uh-uh. Bro it doesn't matter how much evidence you provide people with that this IS happening. They usuall…